Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a centuries old Gothic novel penned in 1818, generated a wide variety of hard-hitting questions at today’s Venice Film Festival press conference as the filmmaker was asked about artificial intelligence, Netflix’s strategy of theatrical releases and the real monsters in present day society.
The veteran filmmaker fielded a much softer one to start the afternoon session on Saturday as he was asked why he’s been obsessed with making a Frankenstein film ever since he was 7 years old.
“Honestly, it’s sort of a dream that was more than that, it was a religion for me since I was a kid. I was raised very Catholic, and I never quite understood the saints. Then when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like,” del Toro explained during the press conference at which he was joined by his cast including Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer and composer Alexandre Desplat. “I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively in terms of achieving the scope that that it needed for me to make it different, and to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world. Now I’m in postpartum depression.”
Del Toro directed from his own screenplay, and the story centers on Victor Frankenstein, played by Isaac, a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature (Elordi) to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.
Getting the lead role proved to be a dream come true for Isaac.
“I can’t believe that I’m here right now. I can’t believe we got to this place from two years ago, sitting at [Guillermo’s] table eating Cuban pork and and talking about our fathers and our lives, to him saying, ‘I want you to be Victor, then not really being sure if it was true or if I was just dreaming. It just seemed like such a pinnacle,” he explained. “For Guillermo to then say, ‘I’m creating this banquet for you, you just have to show up and eat,’ that was the truth. It felt like a fusion. I just hooked myself into Guillermo, and we flung ourselves down the well.”
Frankenstein premieres tonight, Aug. 30, inside Sala Grande followed by a limited theatrical release on Oct. 17, and a global bow by Netflix on Nov. 7. A journalist asked del Toro if there’s an agreement in place with Netflix regarding how many films it will be released in and whether or not he’s happy with the arrangement.
“I mean, look at my size. I always want more of everything,” del Toro quipped before focusing on the debate of theatrical versus streaming. “To me, the battle we are going to fight in telling stories is in two fronts. Obviously there’s the size of the screen, but the size of the ideas is very important. The size of the ambition, the size of the artistic hunger that you bring to cinema is a matter of can we reclaim scale and we reclaim scale of ideas? Can we challenge ourselves to that? It’s a dialog, and it’s a very fluid dialog.”
That said, the filmmaker, who is a regular collaborator of Netflix, said he is happy to take the streamer’s reach of more than 300 million viewers worldwide. “You take the opportunity and the challenge to make a movie that can transform itself variably, beautifully, and that evokes that cinema, and then you provide theaters for that on the beginning, and that makes, for me, a very creative experience.”
Isaac, del Toro behind-the-scenes on Frankenstein.
Netflix
On the subject of how the movie’s monstrous themes reflect the current times, del Toro confirmed that “we live in a time of terror and intimidation, certainly,” but the counter to that “is love.” And the counter to artificial intelligence is intelligence.
“I’m not afraid of AI,” del Toro said flatly. “I’m afraid of natural stupidity, which is much more abundant.”
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